Cover Story

Forever Cher

With a No. 1 record in each of the last five decades, Cher is the longest-reigning diva in show business, her talent also attested to by a best-actress Oscar, three Golden Globes, an Emmy, and a Grammy. As she stars in Burlesque, opposite Christina Aguilera, the 64-year-old icon gives a rare interview to the author, opening up about her struggle with Sonny, their child’s sex change, and the reasons she’s envious of Meryl Streep.

Malibu, a 21-mile stretch of oceanfront in Los Angeles County, is where many of the rich and profoundly famous members of the entertainment industry choose to live. Known as the Malibu Movie Colony in the 1920s, it has been home to everyone from Gloria Swanson to Barbra Streisand, from John McEnroe to Tom Hanks, from Britney Spears to Brad and Angelina. Locals invariably tell you that the house Bing Crosby paid around $2,500 for in the 1920s was bought by Robert Redford in 1982 for nearly $2 million. Now houses sell in the neighborhood of $45 million. Just off Pacific Coast Highway, I pull into the private driveway of one such house, a cross between a Venetian palazzo and a Moorish castle. Waiting for me inside is the most glittering Malibu resident of them all: Cher.

An assistant greets me and asks me to wait in the living room, which is suspended seemingly right over the crashing waves of the Pacific. In 2007, Cher sold all of her Gothic furnishings at auction and engaged Martyn Lawrence-Bullard to do a complete makeover. Describing their collaboration, Lawrence-Bullard says, “Cher loves all things that are Eastern—Moroccan, Syrian-inlaid furniture, Indonesian pieces, beautiful 17th-and 18th-century Chinese things. Everything has to feel very Zen, but it also has to have that bit of Cher pizzazz.” The ceiling of the living room is painted in a 16th-century Moroccan design and finished in gold leaf. After a few minutes, the assistant leads me up to the star’s bedroom. According to Lawrence-Bullard, the bed originally belonged to Natacha Rambova, who was the wife of Rudolph Valentino. “I bought it at an amazing Hollywood auction of all this incredible furniture that came from the MGM Studios.”

Cher admits that she can’t remember the last time she sat down for a lengthy interview. “What are we going to talk about for two hours?” she asks, sitting cross-legged on a sofa next to a wall of windows. “There’s no view like it in all of Malibu,” she says. “It’s one of the reasons I don’t sell this place. It’s so big for me, but it’s unbelievable.” Cher has two other properties, she says, “an apartment in town—for absolutely no reason—and a house in Hawaii. When I sold my house in Aspen, I thought my kids were going to disown me.” With no makeup, wearing jeans, a canary-yellow sweatshirt, and Day-Glo orange Nikes, she looks more like a teenager than the rock goddess who has sold some 100 million records. Although she has a well-known fondness for wigs, she is not wearing one today. Her hair, long and jet black, is parted in the center. She has just finished a voice lesson in order to get back into performance shape, after having taken a summer hiatus from her Las Vegas show, which began in 2008 at the Colosseum in Caesars Palace. Cher got a reported $60 million a year and a three-year contract for about 200 performances. The show will close in February.

At 64, she has been up and down too many times to count. “I feel like a bumper car. If I hit a wall, I’m backing up and going in another direction,” she says, adding, “And I’ve hit plenty of fucking walls in my career. But I’m not stopping. I think maybe that’s my best quality: I just don’t stop.”

Cher, who has been in show business for 46 years, has had a No. 1 record in each of the last five decades, from “I Got You Babe,” in 1965, to “Song for the Lonely,” in 2002. She has won an Oscar for best actress, in Moonstruck (1987); three Golden Globes for her performances in The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour (1973), Silkwood (1983), and Moonstruck; an Emmy for her 2003 Farewell Tour special; and a 2000 Grammy for best dance recording, “Believe.”

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Straight Shooter

This fall at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, she stole the show in a sheer bodysuit similar to the one that got her banned from prime time 20 years ago on that same network. She was greeted with a standing ovation by the audience members, most of whom were still in diapers when her “If I Could Turn Back Time” video stretched the boundaries of what could be shown on-air. “So far tonight, I’m the oldest chick, with the biggest hair, and the littlest costume,” she announced before presenting Lady Gaga—wearing a meat dress—with the Video of the Year Award. A star-struck Gaga said, “I never thought I’d be asking Cher to hold my meat purse.” A week later, Cher was spoofing the exchange in the opening monologue at her Vegas show. “I thought Lady Gaga said to hold her mink purse—fuck, this is a steak! [Audience laughter.] I thought, I’ve seen weirder things than that in my life.” She wasn’t so much passing the torch as saying, Remember, bitches, I was the original diva.

“I know I’m not supposed to have any opinions about politics, because I’m famous,” says Cher. Yet the first half of our conversation, over tea served in commemorative mugs from her 2002 tour, is about little else. Cher supported Hillary Clinton in the last election, and although she accepts the fact that Barack Obama inherited insurmountable problems, she still thinks Hillary would have done a better job. A large portion of Cher’s charitable work is devoted to the veterans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I was buying helmet inserts for guys who were in Iraq. Football players have more protection on their heads than the guys over there do.” One of her immediate goals is to join Obama’s Veterans Task Force.

“I would be willing to pay a lot more taxes, because I make a lot more money, but I don’t want to give them more to just fuck things up more,” she continues. “It really should fall on people like me to get together and do things to help the people in this country. If you’re not worrying about how to put food on your table, you [should be] worrying about why other people don’t have food on their table. I remember a great America where we made everything. There was a time when the only thing you got from Japan was a really bad cheap transistor radio that some aunt gave you for Christmas.”

Cher actively criticized the Bush administration, and she was known to call in to c-span occasionally. “I got so obsessed with it that it was kind of interfering with my life. Sarah Palin came on, and I thought, Oh, fuck, this is the end. Because a dumb woman is a dumb woman.” She doesn’t stop there. On the subject of Arizona governor Jan Brewer, Cher says, “She was worse than Sarah Palin, if that is possible. This woman was like a deer in headlights. She’s got a handle on the services of the state, and I would not let her handle the remote control.”

However, she happens to have an appreciation for the conservative televangelist Joel Osteen. “He’s only got kind things to say, and he’s not crying or yelling or telling everybody how they’re going to be damned—and send money right away. I have a problem with religion that makes it so, like, ‘We are the ones. We are the chosen ones.’” I ask her if she’s religious, and she confesses, “I’m just the worst little Buddhist in town. I wish that I did the things that I really believe in, because when I do, my life goes much smoother. I can get pretty wrapped up in the dramatic hysteria.”

Cher has never exercised the benefit of spin; she prefers to be honest and direct. When Chastity, her daughter with the late Sonny Bono, came out as a lesbian, in 1995, Cher was angry with her at first, claiming that she felt as if she were the last to know. She admitted shortly afterward, however, that she had behaved in a very uncharacteristic way. Chastity has since gone through a gender reassignment and is now living as a man. Last May he legally changed his name to Chaz Bono. Cher says, “Well, she’s a very smart girl—boy! This is where I get into trouble. My pronouns are fucked. I still don’t remember to call her ‘him.’ She’s really cool about it—such an easygoing person. Because I’ve hardly called her Chastity since her brother was born.”

The brother is Elijah Blue Allman, 34 and an artist, Cher’s son with Gregg Allman, a founding member of the very successful Allman Brothers Band, whom she impulsively married in Vegas in 1975. They divorced several years later, owing to Allman’s heroin addiction. “You know, I loved him,” Cher admits, “but I didn’t really want Elijah around him alone. It’s hard finding a drug addict who is also going to be a father.”

Cher on the set of Burlesque, her latest film, at Sony Pictures Studios. Photograph by Norman Jean Roy.

Photograph by Norman Jean Roy.

She speaks touchingly and at length about her children, both of whom live in Los Angeles. “The moment Elijah gets in trouble, he runs to Chaz. He just hightails his ass right there. He’s doing art projects, he’s had two exhibits, and he’s actually sold everything. We’ll see what happens. They are both very talented, both very artistic, and they are good children. They’re grown-ups. They’re so different. Chaz had a dad for a long time. Sonny was a great parent for a young child—even like 12, 13. But the moment you had ideas that were contrary, he was not quite as interested. Elijah didn’t really have Gregory. Gregory moved off someplace else. He was the nicest person, even when he was doing drugs. But when you’re doing drugs, the people you’re hanging with aren’t exactly.... You’re not going to church to find these people.”

Cher raised her children essentially as a single mother. “Elijah always called Chastity Da-Di-Da, so we shortened it to Da.” Recently, she says, “I said to Chaz, ‘I can’t not call you Da,’ and he said, ‘Mom, don’t be silly.’ One time, when Chaz was little, we were on a field trip, and she said, ‘I’m so pissed off, Mom. You can never not be Cher—we can never just do something.’ ” She concludes, “So your kids pay. I did the best I could do, and yet it was definitely lacking.” Does she think her kids bear any residual anger? “I think Chaz is pretty much finished with it, and I think Elijah has a little longer to go, but they both really love me a lot. But it’s hard.”

When we get on the topic of her children’s struggles with substance abuse—Chaz has been through rehab for pain medication, and Elijah for heroin—Cher doesn’t blink. “It’s weird, because both of my children had the same drug problems as their fathers—same drug of choice,” she says. “My father was a heroin addict, and my sister’s father was an alcoholic. But it jumped us. It jumped my mom, too, because my grandfather was an alcoholic. I didn’t not do drugs because of moral issues. I tried a couple of drugs, but I never felt good out of control. I have the constitution of a fruit fly. I can’t do coffee, but I can do Dr Pepper.”

Cher seems to have arrived at an appreciation—if not a full understanding—of Chaz’s choice: “If I woke up tomorrow in a guy’s body, I would just kick and scream and cry and fucking rob a bank, because I cannot see myself as anything but who I am—a girl. I would not take it as well as Chaz has. I couldn’t imagine it.”

With Burlesque, which opens on Thanksgiving, Cher has her first lead role in a movie in a decade. Christina Aguilera, the 29-year-old pop star and songwriter, who has won four Grammys and sold 48 million records, makes her film debut opposite Cher. Burlesque is set in a nightclub in Los Angeles. Cher plays Tess, the proprietor; Stanley Tucci plays the stage manager; and Aguilera is a small-town aspiring dancer and singer. The poster says it all: IT TAKES A LEGEND TO MAKE A STAR.

Clint Culpepper, the president of Screen Gems, an arm of Sony Pictures, is responsible for getting Cher back into acting. Aguilera remembers, “I was the first person to sign on to the movie. When I heard that Cher was a possibility, I said, ‘Clint, go after her. Go get her!’ ” Cher confirms, “It was Clint. He got down on his knees and begged. We went to the office, and [the director] Steve Antin had such a vision, and Clint had a passion. David Geffen got involved, sending me e-mails from St. Tropez saying, ‘Sweetheart, you have to do this.’ I was getting barraged.”

Culpepper remembers describing Aguilera to Cher: “You don’t understand. She adores you. She only wants to make it with you. This is a chick that would drink your bathwater.” After Cher agreed to do the project, Culpepper persuaded Aguilera, who had just finished rehearsing on the Sony lot and had her baby son in her arms, to pay a surprise visit to Cher, who was on a nearby soundstage, rehearsing her Vegas show. “So we walk in, and Cher smiles and walks over to us. Christina says, ‘Hi. I’m the one that would drink your bathwater.’ And Cher says, ‘I’m going to say to you what Meryl Streep said to me on the set of Silkwood: “Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.” ’ And she hugged her.”

I ask Aguilera, who was born in 1980 (the year her co-star turned 34), when she discovered Cher. “I noticed her for the first time when she was doing ‘If I Could Turn Back Time.’ She was in her sort of ass-less leather getup, and I think she was performing with a bunch of sailors. Maybe that was engraved in my brain and then inspired me later, for my own ass-less-chaps moment with my video ‘Dirty.’ I guess I remember that moment so well because I have such an appreciation for a strong woman, a woman who’s been there, done everything, before everyone else—who had the guts to do it.”

Stanley Tucci plays Cher’s counterpart and wingman, Sean. He too admits to falling under her spell. “She’s so charming, so funny, so smart, even though she always pretends she isn’t. You can’t help but fall in love a little bit. We were instantly comfortable with each other. I get star-struck. And I was star-struck. But within 10 minutes you’re calling each other filthy names, and you’re not star-struck anymore.”

Sonny Days

To understand Cher, you have to go back to Cherilyn Sarkisian La Piere. As David Geffen, her former lover and consigliere (and her current neighbor in Malibu), says, “She captured the Zeitgeist a very long time ago, and she never left. To do that is a miracle.”

Born in El Centro, California, Cher lived most of her childhood in the Valley, a district in Los Angeles approximately 30 minutes from Hollywood. She says she always wanted to be famous. Would she have felt the same way if she had been born in Kansas? “I would have gotten my ass out of there so quickly! Driving around on my tricycle at four, I shouted to everyone, ‘We’ve got to get out of here! We belong in town!’”

Her grandmother, who recently died at the age of 96, was 13 when she had Cher’s mother, Georgia Holt, a fair-haired, green-eyed beauty, who at 84 lives just down the road from Cher in Malibu, as does Cher’s half-sister, Georganne. Cher’s father fled when she was just a baby, and things became so difficult at one point that she spent time in a Catholic orphanage. “My mother told me once about how she got pregnant with me and didn’t want to be with my dad; she was just so young and inexperienced. My grandmother said, ‘You have a bright future.’ She actually suggested an abortion, so my mom was in the doctor’s office—a back-alley doctor—getting on the table. And then at the last minute she said, ‘I can’t do this. I don’t care what happens—I can’t do this.’”

They had a very bohemian lifestyle. Georgia Holt married eight times (three times to Cher’s biological father). “Our life was so chaotic, just one insane moment after another,” recalls Cher. “They were all artists and models and dancers. I remember, once, my mother saying, ‘You should have a stable future’ and blah, blah, blah. I said, ‘I don’t think I want a stable future if it’s going to be like our neighbors’. I don’t want to be like them.’”

I ask her if it’s the old fear of being broke that drives her to keep working, when most people her age would be resting on their laurels. She responds immediately: “I was driving today from the studio, and I looked up at this apartment building. It was kind of shabby. They had this lamppost with four lights hanging off of it, and I thought, They are really trying hard to make that unattractive two-foot part of the balcony special. I looked up at it, and for this awful chill of a moment I thought, God, I don’t ever want to go back to this. Because when you’re little and you live in some awful place, first of all, it’s crummy, and second of all, you’re ashamed. I remember being really ashamed of my clothes. I was so hard on my shoes. My mom would say, ‘Jesus Christ, Cher, we can’t afford shoes. Stop this!’ I remember going to school with rubber bands around my shoes to keep my soles on. But it wasn’t always like that. We ate a can of stew or a can of beans one week, but then sometimes we lived in Beverly Hills. It was a very strange life.”

She dropped out of high school in the 11th grade and started taking acting lessons. At 16 she moved out of the house, but not before starting an affair with the heartthrob Warren Beatty, who was then 25. Soon after that, she met Sonny Bono, a songwriter and protégé of the producer Phil Spector, at a coffee shop in 1963. (Cher sang background vocals on several of Spector’s biggest hits, including the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”) “I had such a hero worship of Sonny, long after we were together. I just thought he was great.” There was an 11-year age difference, but they lived together almost immediately and were rarely ever apart.

Sonny and Cher catapulted to fame in 1965 with their hit single “I Got You Babe.” They charted 11 Billboard Top 40 hits between 1965 and 1972, including six Top 10 hits. The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour was one of television’s most popular shows from 1971 to 1974, landing Cher—alone—on the cover of Time in 1975.

Although the couple was wildly successful, they lived pretty traditionally. Working long days on the set, never into drugs, Cher would go home almost every night and cook dinner with her husband. “I think I went out two times alone the entire time I was married to Sonny.”

The couple spent a lot of time with an older Hollywood crowd that included Lucille Ball, Jack Benny, and Henry Fonda. According to Cher, “I knew Lucy since I was little. I was crazy about her. My mom was an extra on her show. One time, we were at this party, and Johnny Carson got really pissed off at me, because it was the second inauguration of Nixon. I thought Nixon was a big idiot, and Lucy thought he was a big idiot, and she was making jokes, and I was hysterically laughing. Carson got furious and said that I should get out of the room because I was being disrespectful. He would have never said boo to Lucy—she would have chewed him up and spit him out.”

Sonny’s domineering control of Cher strained their life together. He had married a teenager, but soon she became a woman and a mother. Although he created most of their material, Cher was the superstar, the one everyone wanted to see. She says, “He told me when we were together, ‘One day you are going to leave me. You are going to go on and do great things.’ He wrote me this poem, and I wish to God that I had kept it. He said, ‘You are a butterfly, meant to be seen by all, not to be kept by one.’ I wouldn’t have left him if he hadn’t had such a tight grip—such a tight grip.”

At the start of their big success, Sonny created Cher Enterprises, of which he owned 95 percent and their lawyer owned 5 percent. “Sonny did a couple of things … treating me more like the golden goose than like his wife,” Cher says. By 1974 the marriage was beyond repair. That’s when Cher learned that she owned nothing and was prohibited from working on her own in music, television, or film.

A Life of Her Own

Enter 30-year-old music mogul David Geffen, who not only became her romantic partner but also became involved in extricating her from a crippling financial contract. Today, Geffen sums it up this way: “When they broke up, she was deeply in debt and under contract to him. It was a terrible situation. It was certainly specific to their relationship. It’s hard to talk about this, because of the fact that Sonny’s dead. Let’s just say she survived all that.”

“David’s one of the smartest men I’ve ever known,” Cher tells me. “I lived with him for two years, and just on a daily basis we had a wonderful time. I loved him. I didn’t know anything. I went from one kind of take-charge man to another. David helped me so much. I had no money and no way to live. If it wasn’t for David, I don’t know where I would have been. I would have been in the street.”

She continues, “I did modeling, because that was the only thing that I could do to keep myself going.” In front of the cameras of Richard Avedon and other major photographers, Cher posed for a series of what would become iconic images. Still, she was frustrated. “My friends were Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Anjelica, Goldie … all these women and men who were working at their prime. And I couldn’t take a job. I couldn’t do anything.”

Eventually, Cher became untangled from Sonny and their contractual arrangement, and as the 70s drew to a close, she returned to recording, brushing the charts with the disco hit “Take Me Home.” She also set about re-inventing herself. She attracted the attention of filmmaker Robert Altman, who cast her in a stage play he was directing, Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Her performance impressed director Mike Nichols so much that he cast her in Silkwood as Meryl Streep’s lesbian roommate, a role that earned Cher her first Academy Award nomination.

‘We hung out and drank plum wine—eww—after work. Cher was really fun,” says Streep. “I was smitten by her openness, both as an actress and as a person. It’s incredibly disarming—you’re a little worried for her, like: Are you sure you want to be telling me all this? Her lack of inhibition is part of what endeared her to the national audience on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour—that’s where I first saw her. Most people on TV had a little TV veneer back then, a performing gloss, but her gloss was not only her beauty but how easily she wore it and dismissed it, like ‘No big deal.’ For a showgirl, there’s not a phony bone in her body. What you see is what you get, and when she dresses up and gets gorgeous, you get a whole lot.”

The two women are still close. “She’s so good,” says Cher, “and she makes me laugh hysterically. We are opposites: she takes everything so easily, and I’m so stressed about everything.” She gloats, “I was responsible for Mamie [Gummer, the actress, the second of Streep’s four children]! I take full credit. We were in Texas doing Silkwood, and Don [Gummer] was there with Henry [their son]. Meryl said, ‘We need some time alone. Take Henry—it’s Halloween. Please, just take him.’ So I took Henry, and she got pregnant with Mamie.”

Once Cher’s career in film was launched, she ruled the 80s as serious actress, sex symbol, and MTV rock diva. The 90s brought more film roles, and Cher continued to evolve as an artist. As for Sonny, who had re-created himself so many times, his last metamorphosis was as a Republican congressman. In 1998, while skiing in Lake Tahoe, he was fatally injured. He was 62. Cher delivered the eulogy at his televised memorial service.

“I forgive him, I think,” she says. “He hurt me in so many ways, but there was something. He was so much more than a husband—a terrible husband, but a great mentor, a great teacher. There was a bond between us that could not be broken. If he had agreed to just disband Cher Enterprises and start all over again, I would have never ever left. Just split it down the middle, 50–50.” I ask her if she thought he had regretted not doing so. She replies, “I’m sure he must have.”

Although Cher never remarried after her divorce from Gregg Allman, she has been far from celibate. She was the original cougar, long before Demi Moore and Susan Sarandon made it fashionable. A confessed serial monogamist, Cher dated a number of men who were significantly younger—Tom Cruise, rock guitarist Richie Sambora, and Robert Camilletti, a bartender-actor whom the tabloids named “the Bagel Boy” (because he had worked for a time in a bagel shop) and who was with her for three years. When I ask her if she still talks to any of them, she says, “Old boyfriends make good friends. Robert comes to Christmas dinner. He now flies G Vs—he is a huge pilot. He flies for all the biggest names in this town. He flew me to Jamaica.”

Cher's new co-star, Christina Aguilera, describes her as "a strong woman, a woman who's been there, done everything, before everyone else — who had the guts to do it." Photograph by Norman Jean Roy.

Photograph by Norman Jean Roy.

Très Cher

Three weeks after talking to Cher in Malibu, I arrive at an LAX hangar to fly to Las Vegas on the private G V provided for her by Caesars Palace. Her posse includes Jen, her personal assistant for 17 years; Deb, her other assistant, who has been with her for 34 years; and Lindsay Scott, her manager. One row of seats is taken up by a spectacular Mackie costume: an enormous sunburst of golden quills over a full-length cloak. Soon Cher boards the plane, wearing sunglasses, her signature cowboy hat, a black zip-up sweatshirt, and sandals. I notice that she has bubble-gum-pink polish on her toes. She sits right in front of me, says hello, and gets a Dr Pepper.

I comment on how great her feet look. She says, “My grandmother had the most beautiful feet. When she was dying—my sister got there first, of course, because I’m always late—I opened the door and heard her laughing and joking. She’s dying, she’s 96 years old, and she pulls a manicured foot out from under the covers with a decal on it!” I ask if they were close, and she replies, “Yes. She was just a mean bitch most of the time, but I was her favorite because I was the one who could act like an adult.”

Genetics have always favored Cher, who is part Armenian and part Cherokee. Her mother is still great-looking and a size 8, and Cher’s body has remained impressively unchanged throughout her career. She has openly admitted to having had work done on her nose, mouth, and breasts, but, as she was once quoted as saying, “If I want to put my tits on my back, it’s nobody’s business but my own.”

Seeing her in daylight with very little makeup on, I’m amazed at how normal she looks. It’s only when she’s fully decked out in wigs and costumes that she becomes The Legend. She says, “I’ve been screaming at the top of my lungs at my family, ‘Work out! Work out! Old age is coming!’ At some point you will need the strength. Who would have ever thought you would get this old?”

We talk about aging. She has always been candid about her unhappiness with getting older, feeling that she peaked at 40, and 24 years later she’s still not happy. “I think Meryl is doing it great. The stupid bitch is doing it better than all of us!” she says, smiling. “But I don’t like it. It’s getting in my way. I have a job to do, and it’s making my job harder.”

We land in Vegas about 5:40 P.M., and two hours later Cher is descending in a gilded cage above the sold-out crowd of 4,300. Wearing a gold gown and a headpiece that must weigh 10 pounds, she waves as the lights swoop over her adoring fans. It’s a tight, 90-minute show, as per Vegas rules: these people need to get back to the slot machines. During the performance, she makes 13 costume changes. She has four wardrobe attendants and gets out of each costume and into another in less than two minutes. Bob Mackie, her longtime fashion collaborator, who has been called the Sultan of Sequins, designed all the costumes, including several vintage numbers she brings out. One major crowd-pleaser is a floor-length Indian feathered headdress, with which she wears nothing but a buckskin flap and a halter to sing “Half Breed” in a montage of her greatest hits.

“She’s a chameleon, but you never lose her,” says Mackie. “You put a blond wig on her and you still see Cher. Forty years ago everyone thought, Oh, she’s so strange, so weird, so big and gawky. Well, I saw a beautiful little girl and thought, I can work with that. That became part of the attraction of the television show: How naked was she going to be?” I ask him if he has ever told her she’s going too far. “Oh, I’ve said it many times. But, you know, the lady gets what the lady wants.”

There are 18 dancers in the Vegas show, including several aerialists. Cher confesses to longing for the giant crowds you get when you’re touring. “I really miss the arenas. I won’t do what I did last time [a grueling 325-performance tour that went from 2002 to 2005, from which she is rumored to have grossed $200 million]. There’s an energy for me that is different than Vegas. On the road, it’s like people are already having a party, and I just happen to arrive late.”

Her stamina is something to behold. “It’s not an easy job,” she says. “You just have to make it look easy. But also, it’s just a job. I’m not doing anything that’s monumental. I know what I do is kind of a tonic for people. I’m either dying in my house or onstage.”

One thing continues to bug her. “Sonny and I still aren’t in the [Rock and Roll] Hall of Fame, and it just seems kind of rude, because we were a huge part of a certain kind of music, and we lasted for a very long time.… I have so much of everything that I want that those things don’t usually bother me. It bothers me a little bit more because Sonny was a good writer, and we started something that no one else was doing. We were weird hippies before there was a name for it, when the Beatles were wearing sweet little haircuts and round-collared suits. The Rolling Stones were the only ones who understood us. People hated us here; we had to go to Europe to become famous. We influenced a generation, and it’s like: What more do you want? Actors don’t take me that seriously, either. So I always thought, I’m not an actor; I’m not a singer; I’m somewhere in between. And I’ve always felt like an outsider, so it doesn’t bother me anymore. I like that status, truthfully.”

At this point in her life Cher’s sense of irony is well established. She is content to be the punch line of the joke, as long as she has the last laugh. At one point in the Vegas show, she asks the crowd, “Does this headdress make my ass look fat?” Then she turns and walks offstage.

Navel Gaze
A photo from The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, circa 1973. Cher engaged designer Bob Mackie to work exclusively with her on all of her costumes for the show’s four-year run and, later, for her own solo gig, The Cher Show. The designer’s fluency with feathers, beading, and irrepressible theatricality produced some of Cher’s most iconic looks—and caught the attention of the CBS Standards Department. Navel-flaunting was still risqué for 70s family prime time.

From CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images.

Party Fowl!
Cher steps out in 1974 wearing a barely there Bob Mackie bodysuit with feather-and-crystal embroidery—the same look she would famously wear on the cover of Time the following spring. “She had such an unbelievable body,” Mackie said of his muse. “She could wear anything.”

By Ron Galella/WireImage.

It’s Not Unusual
Cher trades in her signature down-to-there black mane for an outré pouf wig. She’s performing with Tom Jones in a 1976 Thanksgiving special, and still svelte in a sheer studded top and nude bra.

From CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images.

That’s Entertainment
And now for the requisite Busby-Berkeley-meets-She-Ra moment, complete with finger waves and gold Art Deco headpiece at the 1978 Disco Convention (can they please revive these?). Three years married to rocker Gregg Allman, Cher didn’t let her post-Sonny career halt any fashion derring-do.

By Ron Galella/WireImage.

Crystal Palace
Cher does glittering glamazon at a 2000 benefit performance in a silver charmeuse Mackie bodysuit. A 2005 auction of select Cher costumes by the designer netted nearly $200,000.

By Peter Still/Redferns.

In Xanadu
Cher goes regal as Mackie’s Mongolian queen during the Farewell Tour 2002. The fashion designer has worked with the artist on every tour and TV appearance since the early 70s.

By Rick Diamond/WireImage.

Rip, Torn
Cher, in gothic-glam Mackie at the 50th Annual Grammys in 2008. What was it they said about the cockroaches? Never mind … just know she’ll be there.

By Steve Granitz/WireImage.

Navel Gaze
A photo from The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, circa 1973. Cher engaged designer Bob Mackie to work exclusively with her on all of her costumes for the show’s four-year run and, later, for her own solo gig, The Cher Show. The designer’s fluency with feathers, beading, and irrepressible theatricality produced some of Cher’s most iconic looks—and caught the attention of the CBS Standards Department. Navel-flaunting was still risqué for 70s family prime time.

From CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images.

Party Fowl!
Cher steps out in 1974 wearing a barely there Bob Mackie bodysuit with feather-and-crystal embroidery—the same look she would famously wear on the cover of Time the following spring. “She had such an unbelievable body,” Mackie said of his muse. “She could wear anything.”

By Ron Galella/WireImage.

It’s Not Unusual
Cher trades in her signature down-to-there black mane for an outré pouf wig. She’s performing with Tom Jones in a 1976 Thanksgiving special, and still svelte in a sheer studded top and nude bra.

From CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images.

That’s Entertainment
And now for the requisite Busby-Berkeley-meets-She-Ra moment, complete with finger waves and gold Art Deco headpiece at the 1978 Disco Convention (can they please revive these?). Three years married to rocker Gregg Allman, Cher didn’t let her post-Sonny career halt any fashion derring-do.

By Ron Galella/WireImage.

Hula Honey
Cher onstage in 1979. The icon opines: “Until you’re ready to look foolish, you’ll never have the possibility of being great.”

By Ron Galella/WireImage.

She’s Truly Outrageous
Cher channeling Jem (or was it the other way around?) in N.Y.C., 1985. That same year, Cher starred in Mask, her first critical and box-office success as a leading actress.

By Ron Galella/WireImage.

Maharaja Mama
The artist brings her regal best to the Met’s 1985 tribute to 19th-century Indian royalty.

By Tom Gates/Getty Images.

Oscar Glory
At the 1986 Academy Awards, Cher looks downright demure in a Mackie chain-link halter and feather headdress. She was not nominated for her role in Mask, a snub the actress took personally. Cher settled the score on the red carpet, famously saying, “As you can see, I did receive my Academy booklet on how to dress like a serious actress.” Jane Fonda later introduced her onstage: “Wait’ll you see what’s gonna come out here … ”

From Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Turn Back Time
Cher in a 1992 performance, a direct sartorial reference to a showpiece from her 1979 show (with an assist from sheer nylon). If she could turn back time? Not if, but rather … how.

By Peter Stil/Redferns.

Paging Morticia Addams
Cher at the Met again to celebrate the work of Gianni Versace, 1997. The designer’s flamboyant and sexy take on dressing attracted Cher, who remained a regular and faithful client during his life. She’s seen here in a studded leather gown and matching overcoat.

By Ron Galella/WireImage.

Barely There
Not to disappoint on Oscar night, Cher is crème de crochet at the ‘98 Academy Awards in a Bob Mackie dress and headpiece. The actress was included in the onstage tribute for all living best-actor and actress winners. Months earlier, her ex-husband and partner Sonny Bono died in a skiing accident.

By Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic.

Do You Believe?
Cher does rave nymph at the A.M.A.’s in 1999 for her “Believe” record. The techno torch song is one of the best-selling singles of all time, with more than 10 million copies sold worldwide and a Grammy win for Best Dance Recording. She was 53.

By Jim Smeal/WireImage.

Crystal Palace
Cher does glittering glamazon at a 2000 benefit performance in a silver charmeuse Mackie bodysuit. A 2005 auction of select Cher costumes by the designer netted nearly $200,000.

By Peter Still/Redferns.

In Xanadu
Cher goes regal as Mackie’s Mongolian queen during the Farewell Tour 2002. The fashion designer has worked with the artist on every tour and TV appearance since the early 70s.

By Rick Diamond/WireImage.

Rip, Torn
Cher, in gothic-glam Mackie at the 50th Annual Grammys in 2008. What was it they said about the cockroaches? Never mind … just know she’ll be there.